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The "mash up popular movies with prior movies that inspired them" genre has been around at least since Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" series, but Michael Heilemann's video "Kitbashed," which aims to intermingle Star Wars: A New Hope with clips of everything from Flash Gordon to the soundtrack to Kings Row, is perhaps the most ambitious entrant I've seen to date:
Star Wars: Kitbashed from Michael Heilemann on Vimeo.
Heilemann is clear that the montage doesn't, and can't, include everything that might have inspired George Lucas. The film is part of a book project, and the eventual e-book will be able to chronicle source material that's harder to interpolate into a mashup video. He chose to do a full movie-length video rather than a shorter, Ferguson-esque one highlighting only similarities with past films to ensure he didn't diminish Lucas' contributions, or portray the film as simply the sum of its influences. "I could have made a super-fast cut of the Battle of Yavin, but above all it wouldn't show you where I don't believe it used inspiration, only where it did," he writes, "and secondly I couldn't bring myself to cut down that sequence because it remains to this day one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking ever."
Hat-tip to Digg.